Goatfell, Isle of Arran portrays the Scottish landscape at its essential geometry: a luminous sky, a still sea, and the great peak of Goatfell rendered in thinly layered planes of colour that feel as ancient as it is modern. Across a hushed expanse of water, the effect is meditative, with distance and silence made visible on paper; a single mountain rises from the horizon with an almost preternatural calm.

Artist Craigie Aitchison CBE RA (1926–2009) was among the school of Modern British Art: a Scottish-born painter whose deceptively spare compositions earned retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, and whose work entered the permanent collections of Tate, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Museum Wales. His signature technique of using translucent washes of colour laid in bold, flattened fields, with form pared to its irreducible core, may appear naive but also draws comparisons to the Scottish Colourists, Milton Avery, and Piero della Francesca.

This original screenprint from 2008 is characteristic of Aitchison’s late period: the mountain and water are rendered as near-abstract colour planes, the palette spare and cool, the composition achieving emotional weight through restraint rather than elaboration. While his larger oil paintings of Arran carry the visible grain of the canvas beneath their thin washes, this print translates his brushstrokes of colour into a different, intimate register. This piece sits within a late body of work in which Aitchison returned repeatedly to the Scottish landscape of his origins, finding in its contemplative silence the defining quality of his devotional paintings.